The Ploughed Ground – 1

One of the earliest speculations about unrecorded voyages to Australia comes from the memoirs of Joseph Mason, a convict who served his sentence in NSW in the 1830s.  Mason’s handwritten memoirs remained almost unknown, but were finally edited and published in 1996 [Kent and Townsend 1996] and are an important source for Australian convict history as seen from the inside.

Mason was transported for participation in unrest arising from the social dislocations accompanying industrialisation in Britain.  Perhaps because of his status as a political prisoner he reveals himself to be a thoughtful chronicler whose memoirs are quite different from the normal convict fare.  He was assigned as a convict servant to Hannibal Macarthur at his Vineyard estate near Parramatta in 1831.  Macarthur also had another grazing estate called Arthursleigh on the banks of the Wollondilly, south of Sydney, which had been established before official settlement was permitted within this area [Fletcher 2002].

In a section of his memoirs where he speculates about previous history of Australia, and whether the Aboriginal people were its sole former occupants, Mason says:

There is two spots of ground one about 30 miles to the south of any residence and the other on the bank of the Hunters River which I was informed by creditable witnesses as well as having seen the same in a book bear marks as if it had once undergone the operation of ploughing. The first of these lies in the road leading to the south of the colony and is always called the ploughed grounds. The blacks have been asked if they know what occasioned these spots [of] land to Assume their present shape but their are quite ignorant as to the cause Had any of their ancestors been acquainted with husbandry there certainly would have been more extensive marks of it remaining than these two spots of ground nor is it likely that the present race or rather generation should have been so retrograded from the path of industry as to possess not a single grain of corn an agricultural impliment, or the slightest notion of cultivating land.  [Kent and Townsend 1996: pp. 121-2]

Kariong hieroglyphs – the movies – Part 2

The video clips showing Kariong just keep coming.  The first part of the this post gave 14 clips that collectively ran for more than an hour and a half.  In the year or so since then another bunch of clips have emerged.  Some of these follow the same format of shaky close-ups on the glyphs, which don’t really add much to what you have seen before, and can make you seasick after a while.  But there’s a lot more too!.  We get the site’s all too brief stardom when it featured in the Tony Robinson’s Australia series.  Among other highlights are footage of Val Barrow channelling her spirit guide Alcheringa on the site, and Paul White, who wrote the first articles about the site, presenting part of his dcumentary series from 1993.  All together its an interesting mix of scepticism through to wholehearted acceptance as genuine, and its even longer – totalling just under two hours.

As before I present these for your information and enjoyment.  If you come across any others, please drop me a line.  Until then, take the phone off the hook, uncork that shiraz and enjoy!

Daly River scarab

In 1963 it was reported in a letter to People magazine that an Egyptian scarab had been discovered by some children while playing beside the road near the Daly River, in the Northern Territory of Australia.  This discovery soon featured in articles about secret visitors written by Michael Terry in the mid-late 1960s, was picked up and promoted by Rex Gilroy in the 1980s and 90s, and then perpetuated and spread by the internet in the 2000s.  Is it actual proof of Egyptian contact?  Is it an actual scarab?  Is it actual anything?  Read on for the story.

Michael Terry bibliography

Michael Terry wrote extensively about his explorations.  His later travel journalism is less well-known, but probably was much more widely read, in popular mass-market publications like Walkabout and People.  It is this material which includes his secret visitor speculations. I have found the following references thus far, but doubtless there are more.  This list will be updated when necessary, and any additional references are most welcome.

Terry’s life is documented in his manuscript autobiography, which was completed by his sister Charlotte after his death [Barnard 1987].  A later historian of Northern Territory exploration discusses some of the problems in filling the gaps in Terry’s life, when he had carefully edited the surviving documentary record [Dewar 2009].

Terry’s personal papers largely relate to correspondence from the 1960s-70s and of letters received.  He does annotate the date of his reply on many of them, but almost none of his own responses are preserved [NLA 611-1].  In individual posts relating to particular claims I have tried to verify the presumed sequence of correspondence, including letters that are lost.

Special issue on Pseudoarchaeology and Religion in Numen

It’s not very often at all that you see an academic paper on pseudoarchaeology, so its some sort of red-letter event when one entire issue of an academic journal devotes itself to the subject.  Perhaps its not a coincidence that the transit of Venus is taking place; both are equally rare events and maybe planets and celestial bodies have to be in the right alignment for this to happen.

Numen is an academic journal that is, as its subtitle says  an ‘International review for the history of religions’.  Guest editors James R Lewis and Pia Andersson of the University of Tromso, Norway, and Stockholm University respectively, corralled a number of scholars to contribute papers on the aspects of pseudoarchaeology that deal with a broad range of issues relating to belief and faith.

The contents of the special issue, and abstracts from the publisher’s website follow.

More from Walsh’s Pyramid, Queensland

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The Jordanian Princess and the Eucalypt

In a 1967 article on the Egyptian presence in Australia Michael Terry wrote

[i]n February 1964 the tomb of a woman, probably dating back to 1,000 B.C., was found on the site of an ancient city in the Jordan Valley.  Examination of the body suggested that eucalyptus oil had been used to embalm it.  The only sources then of such oil were the gum-trees of Australia and New Guinea.  Now, of course, they are relatively common overseas but only since Baron von Mueller instituted a seed exchange between Australia and other parts of the world … [Terry 1967: p. 21].

As with many of the elusive snippets of information Terry used, no source was provided for this find.  The aim of this blog is to track down the source of Australian secret visitor claims such as this, and to work out what the actual evidence is, rather than the snippets that are sometimes misinterpreted and misapplied.

For example, in an earlier post I tried to track down claims that kangaroos had been found in Egypt.  As it turned out there had been a misreading of a well-publicised palaeontological finding.  Fossils of ancient marsupials, millions of years old, had been found in Egypt but journalists had misunderstood the meaning of this and had focussed entirely upon the marsupial aspect, assuming it inevitably meant kangaroos.  In fact, these were the ancestors of the South American opossums, and were only very distantly related to Australasian marsupials.  The mistake was readily understandable once I was able to get back to the original source and to do that I had to narrow down the time range by looking at the earliest mention of the mistaken reading, and working backwards from there.

Terry’s gave no source for the information.  Having only occurred three years before it was written I had hoped that it would have been based on a news item and readily findable.   Could I find it?  Would the eucalyptus resin be a mistake, a journalistic flourish, a reliable result?